The woman did not turn but, seeming to sense her pursuer, lowered her head, hastening toward the maze of tents that marked the center of the makeshift international village. Yates shot across a low pile of gravel to intercept her, reaching the head of the path she hurried down, blocking it, waiting with crossed arms to confront her.
When she stopped ten feet from the American and raised her oddly fierce countenance Shan almost called out Ama Apte’s name, but the words died away as he saw the strange flood of emotion on the astrologer’s face. Her face went blank for a moment as she looked at Yates, then contorted in confusion, even fear, before shifting into a small, worried grin. The American wavered, as if intimidated by the woman’s intense emotion, and said nothing more as she pressed her hands together in a traditional leave-taking gesture, then, with a remarkable burst of speed broke off to the right, over another mound of gravel, and disappeared into the throng of porters.
“What the hell was that about?” Yates asked as he returned to Shan. “She was in Megan’s tent.”
“You haven’t met Ama Apte?”
“The astrologer? Never did.” He looked back toward Megan Ross’s tent, as if thinking of investigating further, then shrugged. “She and Megan are friends,” he added, then motioned Shan back into the supply tent.
He followed the American back into the entry to the hiding place, which Yates had already rebuilt. The fugitive monks gazed fearfully at Shan as he knelt in front of them, studying each in turn, looking for injuries. Each clutched his gau tightly, with whitened knuckles, and each of the gaus, Shan saw, was an ornate box with intricate lotus blossoms worked in silver. He recognized the young one with the scar on his chin who had lingered by the bus with the old lama.
“I mean no harm,” Shan said in Tibetan. “Hiding among foreigners was very clever,” he offered. “The sherpas helped you?”
The monks’ only answer was to look toward Yates.
“The only risks I want the sherpas to take is above twenty thousand feet, juggling oxygen containers for my wheezing customers,” the American stated in a flat voice.
Shan looked back and forth from the monks to Yates. “My God,” he said in an astonished whisper, “you speak Tibetan.”
“You keep stealing one secret after another from me,” the American replied, a trace of resentment in his voice.
Shan could count on one hand the number of Westerners he had met who had taken the trouble to learn Tibetan. He replayed in his mind his prior encounters with the American. “Tsipon doesn’t know,” he concluded. Shan reminded himself of the conversation in which Tsipon had switched from Tibetan to slander the American.
“He and I do fine in Chinese. No need to complicate our relationship.”
A dozen questions leaped to mind but a movement at his side caused him to turn away. The monks were folding and tying the sleeping bags they had sat on, as if preparing for travel, glancing nervously at the strange Chinese in their midst as they worked. He raised his hand, palm open. “There is no need to leave. I only have some questions about what happened after you went up the slope that day.”
The youngest monk paused, lifting the solitary candle closer to Shan’s face. “You’re the one!” he exclaimed, then turned and whispered urgently to his companions..
“The one?” Yates asked suspiciously.
“He was there,” the young monk explained. “Just after the rocks hit the bus. He made me understand we had to flee. He pointed out the safe way to go. Without him we would have been taken by those soldiers again.”
Shan glimpsed the confusion on the American’s face before leaning forward toward the monks, taking the candle, and holding it close to each of them in turn. They were bruised and scratched, their robes in tatters. A hollow desolation had begun to settle on their faces. It was an expression he knew all too well. The three Tibetans had probably spent their entire lives since boyhood in their remote, sheltered gompa. It was entirely possible they had never seen a gun, had never been inside a motor vehicle, that the only outsiders they had ever experienced had been the occasional bureaucrats from the Bureau of Religious Affairs who had tried to tame them for Beijing, until they had been herded at gunpoint into a prison bus.
Now here they were, hidden by an American, surrounded by cartons of strange supplies in a camp of Western climbers bundled in gaudy nylon and down, raucously speaking half a dozen languages. They had been stripped of their prayer beads, stripped of the peaceful, prayerful existence they had carried on in the high ranges, cast out into an alien world.
Shan bent, silently lifted a large, flat pebble from the ground, then turned to Yates and extracted the felt-tip pen extending from the American’s shirt pocket. He quickly wrote on the stone and handed it to the young monk.
“A mani stone!” Yates exclaimed.
Shan had written a mantra on the stone, the mani prayer to the Compassionate Buddha that could be found on stones of all sizes, all over Tibet, left at shrines, stacked in walls leading along pilgrims’ paths. He held the pen up in silent query toward Yates, who offered a nod, then handed it to the young monk, who enthusiastically began scooping more pebbles from the ground.
“I had a mule that day with a dead man on it,” Shan stated after the monk had made two more stones. “Did you see it?”
The monk nodded. “There was a mule on the trail we cut across above the road. It was wandering up the mountain, eating grass along the way.”
“Was its burden intact?”
“With its burden,” the monk replied with a nod. As he made another prayer stone his brow wrinkled. “Later, when we had climbed for an hour, I looked down and saw it like a little toy creature far below. A toy horse was coming up behind it with a toy man chasing the horse. But the man stopped when he reached the mule.”
“What happened?” Shan asked.
“We kept climbing, faster than before. Some of the soldiers had begun shooting into the rocks, as if we were wild game.” One of the two older monks leaned toward the novice, whispering. “We must find our friends, the other members of our gompa,” the novice announced.
Shan and Yates exchanged an uneasy glance.
“Ten of you were on that bus,” Shan said. “Six of the others have been recaptured. Another was killed.”
Small moans of despair came from the monks. They clutched their gaus again.
“The old one, at the side of the road?” the young monk asked, his voice cracking.
“They took him away. He’ll be in a prison somewhere by now, far from here.”
The novice sank back against the wall of cartons. One of the other monks, the oldest, placed a hand on the young one’s shoulder. “We will begin anew at our gompa, when things have quieted down,” the monk offered in a consoling tone, then explained to Shan and Yates. “We are in a line of caretakers who have kept the old shrines there for more than four hundred years. The books Sarma gompa makes have been used all over Tibet for centuries.”
Shan’s mouth opened but he had no words. “Your gompa,” He stated at last, his voice gone hoarse, “has passed on.” He could not bear to meet the puzzled gazes of the three monks.
“Passed on?” asked the oldest.
“The government went back with machinery,” was all Shan could say.
The silence was that of a death rite. Yates cursed. Another anguished cry escaped the throat of the youngest monk, and he squeezed one of his new mani stones until his knuckles were white. With trembling hands, one of the older monks formed a mudra, an invocation of the protector goddess.
Yates stared intensely at the ground, his eyes filled with pain. Shan could see in his eyes that, like Shan, he felt a share of the guilt for the gompa’s destruction.
“That old Buddha,” the older monk said at last. “Does he still live?”
Shan recalled the painting on the rock face at the rear of the gompa. “The last time I saw, he was untouched.”
The monk nodded gratefully and spoke in a serene tone. “Now he will be able
to see the mother mountain without any obstruction.”
The American’s face flooded with emotion. He looked at Shan with a mournful, pleading expression.
“I need buttons,” Shan said to him in English.
“Buttons?”
“I need three hundred twenty-four buttons. And some of the thread used to repair canvas tents.”
Yates stood warily, shaking his head but gesturing Shan to lead the way out of the chamber. They searched together in the big chest of tools, then in several smaller plastic chests that contained miscellaneous supplies. When they found the heavy thread but no buttons, Shan asked for washers, but they could only find two dozen, all in the tool chest. He studied the stack of cartons, then pointed to one near the top.
“You want rolls of candy?” the American asked incredulously.
“And a tin plate,” Shan said.
When he returned to the hidden chamber, Yates a step behind, Shan carried the spool of heavy thread and twenty rolls of candy rings. He broke three rolls open, dumping their contents onto the plate. The oldest monk, understanding immediately, reached out with a grin and started tying a red candy circle to one end of the thread.
“Malas,” Shan explained to Yates. “They need to have prayer beads. One hundred eight to the string. In my prison,” he added, “the old Tibetans sometimes made them out of fingernail cuttings.”
They left the monks, working on their makeshift malas, Yates leading Shan in silence back to his makeshift quarters. The American lit his little stove, produced two metal mugs, two black tea bags, and brewed each of them a cup of tea before speaking.
“What the hell do you want, Shan?”
“An innocent man is being held for those murders. I mean to find the truth.”
“That man Tan is a colonel in the army, head of some gulag county, one of those that goes around destroying monasteries. They say dozens of monks have died in his prison. No one would call a man like that innocent.”
“I mean to find the truth,” Shan repeated.
“And you want me to help free a monster like that? Not likely. You were a prisoner yourself once they say.”
“I was his prisoner.”
“My God. Then why would you want him freed?”
Perhaps it was the soothing warmth of the tea, or just his exhaustion, that caught him off guard. The words were out of his mouth as if of their own accord. “My son is in the Public Security mental hospital twenty miles from here. The only chance he has of survival is for me to get him out of there, get him transferred back to the camp he came from. It was my old prison. There I could see that he was looked after. Colonel Tan is in charge of the prison.”
“Christ!” Yates stared into his mug. “China!” he groaned, as if it explained everything, shaking his head back and forth. The American searched Shan’s face for a moment, drank deeply, then gazed back toward the hiding place inside the cartons. “Those monks have to be saved,” he declared.
“Those monks have to be saved,” Shan repeated. He decided not to push Yates into telling him how the monks arrived at his depot.
“Fine. I won’t tell the knobs you helped the monks escape, you won’t tell about me helping them. So finish your tea and get out of here. You depress me. You and I have an understanding, Shan, that’s enough.”
“No, we don’t. The people in the valley will be very upset with you, with all American climbers, when I tell them that you have been stealing their Yamas. The Lord of Death is tough enough on them without someone deliberately affronting him.”
“I don’t think you’ll tell them. I saw what you did with those monks in there. You’re not like that.”
“You weren’t listening. My son is going to die if I don’t get Tan out of jail. You think I am going to be upset about embarrassing some American?”
“You act as if the murders are connected to someone at the base camp, even connected to me. They are not. You are not going to solve the killings here.”
“It’s not the murders I’m looking to solve right now. It’s the mystery of the ambushed bus. The mystery of how that equipment got there, how someone expert in rigging rope set it up.”
The American said nothing. He drained his mug and stood.
“Likewise not connected to the murders.”
“It doesn’t matter if you know they are not. The government believes they are.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“At the scene of the murders they found a statue of Yama.”
Yates seemed to stop breathing for a moment. His brow creased with worry. “I had nothing to do with the murders.”
“Director Xie has begun investigating the monks and those who might help them. The Bureau of Religious Affairs office in Shogo was burned down and a figure of Tara left in the ashes. Even he can see such an obvious pattern. He will soon discover that the other old Yamas are being stolen, then he will convince himself that whoever stole the Yamas committed the murders. When Cao finds out, they will try to pick up the trail of the missing Yamas, interrogating all those innocent people in Tumkot, probably run fingerprint tests on those figures that were returned. In a few days they will declare that whoever stole the Yamas was Tan’s partner in the assassination.”
“The statues I collect are only of Yama.”
“A subtlety that will likely be lost on Xie, and certainly on Public Security.”
Yates’s face drained of color. “Are you saying someone is trying to make it look like it was me, to frame me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they want to cast suspicion on traditional Tibetans. But once they find the trail of the stolen Yamas. .” Shan didn’t finish the sentence. “Foreigners engaged in crime aren’t always deported. Some disappear into the gulag, though I have never heard of one lasting more than a year or two. If I were you I’d get in my car and not stop driving until I was in Nepal.”
Yates turned his head, back toward the hidden monks. “Those monks have to be saved,” he repeated in a hollow voice.
“Cao and Xie don’t have to wait for fingerprints. They will have discovered by now that a ministry film team was here for two days before the Minister’s visit, collecting background footage. Cao will isolate every frame that contains your red and black ropes, and every person who touched those ropes.”
“We have lots of rope. We are always moving it around, measuring lengths, testing it, cutting out frayed sections. So what if they catch me on film with those ropes?”
“You miss my point. For the knobs, a foreigner is an obstacle, something they just have to work around. They will look for every Tibetan who touched that rope. They will call in Constable Jin and Tsipon, and probably other leading citizens, to connect names to faces. They already have squads out, looking in public places in town.” Shan shrugged. “Tibetan porters faced with Cao know he has the power to send them away for a year, on his signature alone. They will talk, they will remember you driving away with the ropes in your truck, they may even be persuaded to state they saw you on the rocks setting up that ambush on the bus.”
“Damn your eyes!” Yates muttered as he dropped onto his cot. “It wasn’t like that. . ” He sank his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. Shan lit the stove and began preparing two more cups of tea.
It had been a perfect confluence of events, Megan Ross had told Yates. The hotel opening, the conference, the visit of the minister with reporters and cameramen. Ross, Yates explained, had repeatedly asked to meet with the minister in Beijing and been rebuffed. “She told me I would have special impact, as the owner of the new trekking company coming to the Chinese side of the mountain, representing a victory for the minster’s policies, that if I told Wu I would bring a three or four new American expeditions a year the Ministry would agree to Megan’s Himalayan Compact. So she wanted me to be there, waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“There is a bend along the edge of a cliff that overlooks pastures and buckwheat fields below, the mountains in the backgrou
nd. Really beautiful, untouched by the centuries, a perfect example of what Megan’s compact seeks to preserve. She insisted that was the place to intercept the minister’s car. We would wait there, pretending to have a flat tire, blocking the road. The minister would have to stop. We would meet, she would learn who we were, and about the important opportunity we represented.”
“Megan was to be with you?”
“That was the plan. But Megan has never been big on keeping to plans.”
“But surely she expected the minister to have an escort. The closing of the road was a Public Security secret until that morning.”
“Megan knew. She never said how. She said they would stop all traffic from below but they wouldn’t think about the foreigners who might already be above, and those few of us who were around were invited to the minister’s big picnic reception closer to the base camp.”
“So you rigged the rock slide to block it, after the minister’s car went through.”
“No. I just helped her identify the place, a bend in the road with loose rocks above. That was it. She said the rest was too risky for me to be involved. Too many people depend on me as the head of the expedition company.”
“You never wondered where she was that day?”
“No. The night before she called from town, asking if she could use the room reserved for our company at the new hotel, said she would meet me the next day.”
“But she never called, never showed up.”
Yates shrugged. “Megan is impulsive. She’s behind on her life-list for climbs. She figures she has ten more good years of climbing, and she has thirty peaks left on her list. If she found a secret way to get to one of her mountains she would have jumped at it, and would know that I would understand. She always keeps a pack of climbing equipment ready. I left her in town at Tsipon’s little bungalow, where she keeps the pack.”
“Then how did she get to the hotel?”
“She never went to the hotel. She went climbing. She’ll be back any day now.”
“She’s not coming back, Yates. She died with the minister.”
The Lord of Death is-6 Page 16